I started to blogsomewhat on former secretary of state Lawrence Eagleburger — ever since he woke up to the reality of the logical conclusion of the anti-Serb policies he helped promote, and started writing (a decade late) against Kosovo independence. Below are just two additional damning things I recently stumbled across.

First, I’m in the process of reading a memoir written by Nick Petrovich, one of Draza Mihailovich’s anti-Nazi guerillas who helped rescue 513 American airmen between 1943 and 1944 as part of Operation Halyard, the greatest airlift of downed American troops in WWII. He writes:

Finally, after constant pressure by the National Committee of Airmen Resued by General Mihailovich, Inc., led by a dear friend of mine, Major Richard l. Felman, and Major General Donald J. Smith, and supported by many decent and patriotic U.S. Senators and Congressmen, on recommendation of General Eisenhower on March 29, 1948 President Truman finally awarded posthumously Mihailovich The Legion of Merit Chief Commander which reads:

“General Dragoljub Mihailovich distinguished himself in an outstanding manner as Commander-in-Chief of the Yugoslavian Army Forces and later as Minister of War by organizing and leading important resistance forces against the enemy which occupied Yugoslavia from December 1941 to December 1944. Through the undaunted efforts of his troops, many United States airmen were rescued and returned safely to friendly control. General Mihailovich and his forces, although lacking adequate supplies and fighting under extreme hardship, contributed materially to the Allied cause, and were instrumental in obtaining a final Allied victory.”

– Harry S Truman

Strangely, this award was kept secret until it was uncovered and made public years later by The Honorable Edward J. Derwinski while serving as Secretary of Veteran Affairs.

Although the rescued airmen vindicated themselves by obtaining the official recognition and finally fulfilling their pledge to Mihailovich for saving their lives, their efforts to erect a memorial to Mihailovich in Washington failed because of the combined objections of the communist government of Yugoslavia, and the U.S. Department of State. A bizarre alliance indeed! Lawrence S. Eagleburger, then U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia, in a letter dated October 4, 1978 urged the Congress not to support the construction of a monument to General Mihailovich because of the sensitive geographic and political situation of Yugoslavia.

On September 8, 1979 [Governor] Ronald Reagan sent a letter to the Committee to Commemorate General Mihailovich in which he said: “The fate of General Mihailovich is not simply of historic significance; it teaches something today, as well. No Western nation, including the United States, can hope to win its own battle for freedom and survival by sacrificing brave comrades to the politics of international expediency.”

After the Red Army marched into Belgrade in October of 1944 and put Tito in control of Yugoslavia, the U.S. offered Mihailovich an escape, but he refused flatly, saying “under no circumstances will I leave my country and my people.” He was captured by the communists on March 24, 1946, and on July 15 sentenced to death. Two days later a firing squad carried out his sentence in a swamp near Belgrade.

Please note that Balkans history is replete with bizarre historically parallel dates. In this case, Mihailovich was captured on March 24, 1946, after Churchill and the Allies abandoned him in favor of the Communist Tito. On March 24, 1999, Bill Clinton’s America bombed the Serbs, once again “sacrificing brave comrades to the politics of international expediency.” This time we were appeasing not the Communists, but the Muslims. Today, we continue to not heed Reagan’s warning, intent on taking our policy of betrayal to its utmost conclusion, which will be our own.

The second item I came across mentioning Eagleburger was in an open letter last year by author William Dorich to the chair of the Philosophy department at Kent State University when the school had scheduled an appearance by Arizona State University philosophy professor Peter French, whose flier for a program about the ethics of war included the following sentence, apparently about a 13th century battle: “Serbian men described themselves as compelled to rape and murder Kosovar women & children. This provoked necessity was felt and sustained by collective memories nurtured in Serbs for seven centuries.” Professor French, who said the quote was taken out of context, canceled the appearance after criticism such as Mr. Dorich’s letter, excerpted below:

An Open Letter to Kent State University

Mr. David W. Odelle-Scott, Chair Philosophy Department

Dear Mr. Odelle-Scott:

I am writing with reference to your invited guest speaker, Peter French [whose] presentation will no doubt be like those of many journalists who found an audience and a quick buck to be made in demonizing the Serbs with collective guilt.
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During the entire decade of the 1990s the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times never published one single article written by a Serbian author, scholar or political leader. Dr. Alex Dragnich, recipient of the Thomas Jefferson Award for Outstanding Scholarship at Vanderbilt University is the author of 10 books on Balkan history and politics. He submitted 42 OpEd articles to the NYT and not a single one was published. This same ugly muzzling of Serbian views was matched by Glenn Campbell, president of the Hoover Institute that said at a major Hoover dinner party. “All Serbs are Nazis…It was too bad if the Croats killed the Jews, but they should have exterminated the Serbs, so that they would have no trouble with them today.” Hoover never apologized for this racist remark by their president.

Richard Holbrooke called Serbs “Murderous Assholes.” Morton Kondracke called Serbs “Bastards” on national television. Lawrence Eagleberger said “Serbs are stupid.” This was after he left the State Department and became a board member of the Communist Bank of Yugoslavia and a board member of Yugo Cars where he earned millions of dollars.

Senator Joseph Biden, who seems to have hoof and mouth disease, called the Serbs “Illiterates, degenerates, rapists, guerillas, butchers, cowards, baby killers, murderers, thugs, aggressors, invaders, terrorists and fascists.” Imagine, Serbs were accused of invading their own country and imagine, too, that this hideous display of hate speech by an American Senator spilled from his lips in just one interview on CNN - August 1, 1993.

There is apparently no shame and no depth to which some people will stoop to demonize the Serbs. Shame on Kent State University for allowing its institution to be sucked into this immoral behavior under the guise of scholarship. […]

William Dorich
Los Angeles, CA

In a follow-up email after I asked for details about Eagleberger’s comment that “Serbs are stupid,” Dorich replied that Eagleburger made the remark on TV when he “left Yugoslavia to return to the State Department at the end of the Bush #1 administration. It was also at that same time frame that he called Milosevich “The Butcher of the Balkans.” This of course was after he was on the board of Yugo Bank, a Communist bank, and Yugo Cars, a Communist company, and had stuffed his pockets with millions of dollars as well as stuffing his face with good Serbian food.”

Just a post-script on the Hoover Institute’s abysmal record on the Balkans, by way of explaining the comment by its late president Glenn Campbell. Dorich wrote the following letter (only excerpted below) to the Institute last year after it published an Albanian propaganda screed in its prestigious Policy Review:

Dear Mr. Rasian:
I write in response to The End of Balkan History by Fatos Tarifa and Peter Lucas featured in the Policy Review of the Hoover Institution — an astonishing attempt to rewrite Balkan history by two Albanians which should have no place in an institution of higher education. But this comes as no surprise as Hoover and Stanford have demonstrated an ugly and biased assault on the Serbian people for many years.

During the Bosnian Civil War when hundreds of Bosnian Forums were organized on university campuses across the country, Serbs were always denied participation. At such a forum at Stanford, Provost Condoleezza Rice was contacted by this writer to offer my participation in the forum along with a number of prominent Serbian scholars including Dr. Alex Dragnich, recipient of the Thomas Jefferson Award for Outstanding Scholarship at Vanderbilt University, and author of ten books on Balkan history and politics.

Ms. Rice ignored our telephone calls and correspondence. Instead, she made the opening statements for this student-sponsored Bosnian Forum in which Serbs were denied a right to participate.

At a Stanford University dinner party in 1992, the former president of the Hoover Institute Glenn Campbell (died 2001) said publicly: “All Serbs are Nazis…….It was too bad if the Croats killed the Jews, but they should have exterminated the Serbs, so that they would have no trouble with them today.”

The Hoover Institution never made a public apology to the Serbian community for this immoral and outrageous outburst. I personally took great exception to this unbridled racism since I lost 17 of my relatives during the Holocaust who were burned to death in a Serbian Orthodox church in the village of Vojnic in 1942 by Croatians and their Nazi Catholic priests. I lost the last 5 relatives of my name during Operation Storm in August of 1995 when 200,000 Serbs were “ethnically cleansed” from Croatia. My relatives were too old and too sick to flee. They were found a month later with their throats slit. The insults, bigotry, slander and lies leveled at the Serbian people in this country — and which led to US support of that war and those massacres were led by morons from your institution.

Serbs came to this country before the turn of the century settled in the gold country of California where they built the first Serbian Orthodox Church 1896 (a church still in use) and have built a dozen churches throughout California since. The first woman (a Serb) elected to the California State Legislature, Roseanne Vuich, was from Fresno, California - a freeway is named in her memory. The Balkan Chair at your teaching institute is sponsored by the Rados Family of Southern California who have contributed handsomely to Stanford for decades. And yet Serbs have been so vilified with collective guilt that the Hoover Institution reveals that no level of conscience or restraint is necessary in attacking us. The editor of this diatribe should be fired for the contempt shown for Balkan history and for the eagerness with which this publication allow Albanians to rewrite history.

We now know that Operation Storm was aided and abetted by U.S. intelligence with cover from the US Airforce who turned off the radar system to allow Croatia to violate the “No-Fly Zone”. The Croats bombed and strafed fleeing Serbs, a war crime by every definition.

Operation Storm was led by Agim Ceku, a convicted Albanian war criminal who massacred Serbs in Croatia in 1992 and 1995 and went on to massacre entire Serbian villages in Kosovo. (This is well documented by the Dutch whose troops were on the ground and by Canadians…) How immoral that the Hoover Institute now pays tribute to Ceku, a convicted criminal who anointed himself Prime Minister over Kosovo before any statehood had been internationally considered or granted.
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What is shocking about the two writers of this ugly assault on the Serbs is the skill with which they rewrite history with impunity and how it seems to have the blessing of the Hoover Institute.
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Is the Hoover Institution really this naive to not face the fact that Albanian ambitions point directly to a Greater Albania? The comment “Nobody wants to cohabit with Belgrade,” is disgusting and insulting, considering the Serbs were the majority of Kosovo for a thousand years until the Holocaust when over 10,000 Serbs were liquidated and more than 150,000 were ethnically cleansed from Kosovo. (And considering that Albanians were in the Milosevic Government!) Tito forbade their return, giving Serbian land to Nazi collaborators. When Tito granted “autonomy” to Albanians in 1974 without a single vote of the Serbian people, Albanians began their assault on the remaining Serbs by banning the use of the Serbian language.

The Albanian authorities removed over 2 million books on Serbian religion, history and music from Kosovo schools and libraries and burned them. From 1974 to 1989 more than 125,000 Serbs were forced from Kosovo by the rape of Serbian nuns and Serbian girls which your writers cleverly ignore.
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I would think that Stanford University and the Hoover Institute would be appalled at such anti-intellectual behavior but apparently there is no depth to which you will not stoop to further demonize the Serbs who were our allies in two World Wars as you defend Albanians, the majority of whom were Nazi collaborators and would not know a democratic principle if it smacked them in the face.

Striving for an ethnically pure Albanian Kosovo state in the heart of Europe is repugnant especially when a major American teaching institution provides the means to achieve such a goal through unbridled propaganda and hate speech.